Langley Park Residents on Diversity - 1 post

The political right has bemoaned the United States’ shifting racial demographics. But does this change really hurt the nation? I asked citizens in the diverse community of Langley Park, Md., to weigh in.

Photo by Evan J. Pretzer/Residents of one of Maryland’s most diverse neighborhoods discuss the good and bad of diversity.

From 2009-2017, LGBT people won the right to marry their partners, the restrictions on women serving in front line combat were overturned and, for the first time ever, non-white births began to outnumber those of their Caucasian peers. To many U.S. conservatives, this statistic and the trend towards greater diversity that it represents threatens a core sense of “American” identity they fear will be lost.

On election night 2012, then Fox News pundit Bill O’Reilly declared that the “white establishment” was now a minority. In 2014, former Republican Rep. Allen West, himself African-American, warned that the Coca-Cola Co.’s Super Bowl that depicted a diverse cast singing “America the Beautiful” in English and Spanish would send us all down the fiery road to hell.

And earlier this year, Republican Rep. Steve King of Iowa posted on that we couldn’t restore our civilization with “someone else’s babies.” He later doubled down on these remarks and stated in an interview with CNN that he meant exactly what he tweeted out to the world.